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You no longer need a Facebook account to sign up for Spotify in Germany

One of the more notable knock-on effects of Facebook’s deep integration with Spotify last September (besides making music more social) was that new users were required to have a Facebook account to sign-up for the service.

If you visited the sign-up page in the wake of the new partnership, you’d read:

“You need a Facebook account to register for Spotify. If you have an account, just log in below to register. If you don’t have a Facebook account, get one by clicking the ‘create an account’ link below.”

Now, it seems, this requirement has been removed in Germany. As Digital Music news Reports, Spotify confirmed this yesterday by saying:

“We are introducing this new sign-up option in order to offer non-Facebook-connected users in Germany a choice of ways to access Spotify. Spotify remains absolutely committed to our global strategic partnership with Facebook.”

With just shy of 1bn users globally, it’s likely that a large percentage of potential Spotify users will have a Facebook account anyway, but as we noted in our report last year, users being forced to have a Facebook account to access Spotify was always likely to irk people. However, the move made sense. We wrote:

“Quite simply, the move is massively beneficial for both companies. On the one hand Spotify gets access to many millions of Facebook users, whilst Facebook is making it harder for people to sign-off from its service.”

However large a market penetration Facebook has in Spotify’s launch markets, it is far from everywhere and perhaps this prerequisite is enough to deter a significant chunk of folk from signing up for the music-streaming service. It’s also worth noting that whilst the UK and the US – two big markets for Spotify – have more than 50% of their respective populations on the social network, Germany has less than 30%. According to Social Bakers, at least.

Indeed, it seems likely that this may have forced Spotify’s hand somewhat as it looks to encourage more folk to jump on board.

We reached out to Spotify to ask whether there are plans to make this same move in other markets, and we were told: “We have no plans to replicate this in any other markets.” So there you go.